The winch groaned until it found its limit. Eli cut the motor, palms slick, rope thrumming like a live wire between the skiff and whatever nightmare slept below. The sea had gone too still—flat as glass but breathing underneath.
He leaned over, squinting into the dark. For a heartbeat, the water cleared and showed him something too deliberate to be debris—a ring of black metal the size of a table, chained to a disc half-buried in silt. The center shimmered faintly, not reflecting light so much as swallowing it.
Then a swell rolled through, breaking the image, and his reflection came back wrong. His face looked younger, his eyes still full of the woman who used to sit on the pier waiting for him to come in.
He stumbled back, nearly slipping on the deck. The line creaked. The chain shifted, one heavy link at a time, as if adjusting to his hesitation.
Lightning flickered miles away, a reminder that weather doesn’t wait for reason. Eli reached for the winch handle, meaning to ease it back down—but the chain moved first.
It rolled like something breathing, scraping against the hull before sinking into darkness with a sound halfway between a moan and a warning.
He cut the rope, watched the end slap the water, and told himself it was enough. But the sea, being the oldest liar he knew, didn’t answer at all.
When he turned the engine to leave, the depth finder blinked once, then showed a new number—thirty feet shallower than it should’ve been.
